The Monopolisation of Political Discourse

Abstract

This chapter explores how television news and discussion programmes represent the world of ‘formal’ politics, which is to say the world populated by a professional class of political ‘doers’ organised within political parties, who make and implement policies within institutions that are supposed to be representative of and responsive to the public. Within a representative democracy, every voter is theoretically equal. But in practice, political power is separated from economic power. Voters vote for the former. The latter is unelectable and largely unaccountable to citizens. The story of the rise of neoliberalism is the story of how political power has become ever more subordinated and integrated into the preferences and imperatives of economic power as the social democratic/welfare state structures developed in the middle of the past century are dismantled. Inevitably, this process affects the structure of politics and the representation of that structure to the public via the media. For example, the class of political ‘doers’ operate increasingly within new party-type organisations. In the social democratic period, parties had a traditional mass base of members and were orientated towards constructing a hegemonic constituency of voters; today these ostensibly ideology-free structures operate on a declining membership base and are internally structured to minimise debate and dissent and orientate themselves towards voters as consumers, selling technocratic solutions rather than espousing ideological differences with opponents (Mair 1997: 34–8).